Then last month, Leclair brought a motion seeking to have the whole hearing held in secret, with public and press given the boot.

Now, that’s a sweeping remedy only ever granted in a handful of cases in the country, usually under unique circumstances.

Still, even that wasn’t enough for Leclair.

As media lawyers — joined by the lawyer for the family of Lin Jun, the man murdered, dismembered and mailed out across the land, allegedly by Magnotta — gathered at a Montreal courtroom Monday to argue against Leclair’s motion for a huit clos, as such a closed-door procedure is called in French, Leclair sought a ban on that too.

In other words, he wanted a publication ban upon his efforts to get rendered secret a hearing that is already under a publication ban.

Leclair wanted court artists to be prohibited from drawing Magnotta.

He wanted reporters to be stopped from scrutinizing his client’s appearance.

Why, Leclair thundered once, the press shouldn’t even be allowed to note such things as whether Magnotta was wearing handcuffs or was sitting in the glass prisoner’s box because that might suggest “he’s a danger, you have to watch out for this man.”

Whether Magnotta “smiles or doesn’t smile” or is “wearing white” — none of that ought to be publishable, Leclair said.

For the record, Quebec Court Judge Lori-Renee Weitzman, a hard-to-ruffle presence who appears to have rather a better grasp than Leclair upon the noble “open-court principle” which is supposed to run like a golden river through the Canadian justice system, declined to grant the broad second ban Leclair sought, though she won’t deliver her ruling on the proposed huit clos until Tuesday.

So it is that it can be legally reported that Magnotta, who is 30, was indeed wearing off-white jeans and a white T-shirt. He did not smile. He wore handcuffs. He sat in the far corner of a vast prisoners’ box clearly designed to hold a dozen accused gangbangers, not one small, slight figure.

Artists drew him feverishly, as if at any moment their pens might be confiscated.

For the record, much of this stuff is a lot of hooey.

The theory is that preliminary hearings are held to ensure there’s enough evidence against an accused person to go to trial. The bar is pretty darned low.

Over time, a secondary purpose evolved, in that the prelim gave the defence a useful peek at the Crown’s case against their guy. But with prosecutors now operating under ever-stricter disclosure rules, which means defence lawyers have early access to the entire Crown brief, even that benefit is overrated.

Lawyers who seek a publication ban on a prelim — the judge must grant one if it’s the defence doing the asking — still use the ringing rhetoric that the accused person’s fair-trial rights must be protected by preventing any damaging information from reaching the delicate ears of potential jurors.
Well, that’s pretty much a load too.

Given how long it takes between prelim and trial in this country, not to mention the collective diminishing attention span wrought by the web and the 1,440/10,080 news cycle (that is, news changes every one of the 60 minutes every hour of all seven days, with people forgetting even the startling very quickly), it’s an increasingly specious argument that the routine pub ban on a preliminary hearing is necessary.

Yet lawyers still make the argument, as Leclair did: “The way I see it, the jury pool is sitting out there, the jury pool is listening…”

Yes, however could Magnotta receive a fair trial if some of those jurors knew, for instance, he had worn a white T-shirt to his prelim?

The answer to that is found in two words: Paul Bernardo.

The serial rapist and killer was the subject of years of non-stop press, or, as the judge who presided over the secret trial of Bernardo’s then-wife Karla Homolka once called it, “extraordinary media attention and sensational newspaper reporting.”

The judge cited all that ink as the reason for kicking out the public and foreign reporters not subject to Canadian pub bans from Homolka’s trial, which preceded her husband’s, and closing his courtroom. The inference was, how else would the court ever find 12 good men and women to fairly try Bernardo?

When jury selection began for Bernardo’s trial 22 months later, 1,000 potential jurors were summoned and two weeks booked for the picking.
They got seven jurors the first day. They got four the second. It was all over before they knew it. All the hand-wringing, hysteria and bizarre protections had been for nought: The jurors stepped up, listened to the judge and tried the case fairly, as they almost always do, just as they will for Luka Magnotta, the nonsense from his lawyer notwithstanding.

Magnotta is accused of first-degree murder and a range of offences in the death of the Chinese exchange student last May. Lin’s father, mother and sister are in Montreal, though only his dad was in court Monday.

As the family lawyer, Daniel Urbas, told Judge Weitzman, they have come from their city in China to honour their son. “They would like to be present, to see the Canadian court system work.”

What a disgrace it would be if they don’t notice much of a difference.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile